Just what is Hewlett-Packard Co up to? One week it takes an indirect stake in Ingres Corp via its 10% stake in Ask Computer Systems Inc (CI No 1,509), the next it appears to be saying that Oracle is its preferred relational database for the HP/UX environment (CI No 1,515). Rumours abound that the company will ditch its own database development. Then Hewlett-Packard comes out and says it is pulling out of its fourth generation tools (CI No 1,564). Yet within Hewlett’s proprietary HP3000 system offerings, databases have always formed part of the package. Emmet Hayes, product manager for this range, reckons that of an installed user base of nearly 45,000, 95% use Turbo Image, Hewlett-Packard’s two-tier database that is designed for very fast on-line transaction processing. Originally, Hayes admits that Hewlett did plan to subsume TurboImage in another product to be called HPImage specially designed for Precision Architecture, which was to be a multi-tier database, but among other things, the users were happy with TurboImage and wanted it brought across to the new RISC architecture as it was. So HPImage was scrapped.
Rate of knots
Hewlett’s history with relational databases has not been such a happy one. Despite the fact that AllBase SQL is a bundled product its actual user base is negligible. However, Hayes is adamant that AllBase is being tuned at a rate of knots and that version 2.2 is now as fast as TurboImage was 18 months ago. He says that Hewlett-Packard is determined to develop the fastest SQL implementation of a relational database for the HP3000 series. This sort of tuning will require a good deal of investment, and not all the development will be done in-house. Hayes says that Hewlett-Packard will be looking for third-party offerings for various aspects of the technology. He added that it is possible that part of the Ingres database technology may be used. As for the company’s withdrawal from software engineering tools, this was because Hewlett-Packard could not afford the huge investment required to continue developing such tools. Consequently, Hewlett-Packard is concentrating on providing HP 3000 users and third-party software developers with a good SQL engine so that a variety of software tools can access the database. To this end, Hewlett has contractual agreements with Ingres, Cognos and Infocentre and is negotiating with Oracle among others. In this way, versions of AllBase SQL will always be compatible with the latest releases of leading fourth generation languages. Furthermore, as Hayes explains, this strategy does not lock users in to a single vendor’s software strategy, since, thanks to SQL Access a user should be able to replace the hardware and keep the software.
By Katy Ring
However, Hewlett is also fully committed to TurboImage and Hayes says that this product will be supported into the next century. He believes that a lot of users will develop their TurboImage applications using SQL, so that they can access multi-vendor systems. To this end, Hewlett has introduced its TurboConnect product that enables read access into the TurboImage database using SQL structures. All of which means that TurboImage users can convert to an SQL database in the future should they desire. Oracle and a number of other third-party database vendors have expressed an interest in exploring the TurboConnect route. Sometime in a year or so, Hayes says that Hewlett-Packard will add the K-SAM high speed index to TurboImage to make it go faster. When it comes to the HP/UX Unix environment, Hewlett-Packard is of the public opinion that companies buying into Unix don’t want to be tied into a vendor at any level. Consequently, AllBase SQL is not bundled in as part of the HP/UX package. However, if market pressure mounts – in other words if IBM and DEC start bundling their own, as yet unannounced, database offerings on their Unix boxes then Hewlett-Packard will follow suit. Hayes admits that this would upset Oracle, as will internal mutterings within Hewlett-Packard that AllBase SQL should be offered on other vendors’ Unix syste
ms as well as the company’s own. Yet, surprisingly, there are no plans to convert AllBase SQL over to run under the Domain environment on Apollo boxes. But these are all possibilities rather than realities. One puzzling factor in Hewlett-Packard’s software strategy at present is its apparent reluctance to add system software value to its low-margin Unix systems, which is at odds with the stated intentions of its Open Software Foundation competitors. While Hewlett will offer its own variant of OSF/1 it is evidently not interested in tying users into a database or software engineering strategy, in contrast to IBM and DEC.
Huge numbers
So how does Hewlett-Packard intend to make money out of its Unix systems? In short by shipping them in huge numbers – worldwide, Hewlett’s Unix systems produced revenues of around $2,800m in the last financial year, indicating that sales are as strong as those of Sun Microsystems Inc – Hewlett sells far more high-end multi-user systems than Sun. Hewlett-Packard argues that with the same Precision Architecture manufacturing processes required for both the MPE and the Unix ranges this means that there are manufacturing economies of scale. Furthermore, quality control is strict and most of the peripherals sold are Hewlett-Packard’s own. Hayes explains that sales are also driven by strong third-party agreements such as that with Oracle. However, Oracle is not the preferred database for HP/UX systems, rather it is among those third-party partners that feature on Hewlett’s Premier List, where it resides alongside companies such as Ask Computer Systems Inc’s Ingres Products Division, Informix Inc and Sybase Corp. Nevertheless, relationships between the chief executives of Hewlett-Packard and Oracle Systems are reportedly close, and together the companies appear to be shifting Unix systems as if there were no tomorrow. Whether this relationship will overcome the increasing presence of Ingres within Hewlett’s database strategy, only time will tell.
